Understanding How The Key Participants Organize
How hackers approached the building of their own private economy
In this section we explore how the World Wide Web brought hackers together on message-boards and email chains, where they began to organize. We look at their ambition to a build private networks, and how they staked out requirements to build such a network using the lessons learned in earlier decades.
Hackers begin developing “free” software
Out of the hacker culture grew an informal system of collaborative software-making that existed outside of any individual company. Known as the “free” or “open source” software movement, and abbreviated FOSS, this social movement sought to popularize certain ethical priorities in the software industry. Namely, it lobbied for liberal licensing, and against collecting or monetizing data about users or the way they are using a given piece of software.
In a software context, the term “free” does not refer to the retail price, but to software “free” to distribute and modify. This sort of freedom to make derivative works is philosophically extended to mean “free of surveillance and monetization of user data through violations of privacy.” What exactly is the link between software licensing and surveillance? The Free Software Foundation says of commercial software:
If we make a copy and give it to a friend, if we try to figure out how the program works, if we put a copy on more than one of our own computers in our own home, we could be caught and fined or put in jail. That’s what’s in the fine print of the license agreement you accept when using proprietary software. The corporations behind proprietary software will often spy on your activities and restrict you from sharing with others. And because our computers control much of our personal information and daily activities, proprietary software represents an unacceptable danger to a free society.
Although the Free Software Foundation drew on philosophies from 1970s hacker culture and academia, its founder, MIT computer scientist Richard Stallman, effectively launched the Free Software movement in 1983 by launching GNU, a free and open source set of software tools. (A complete OS did not arrive until Linus Torvalds' kernel was released in 1991, allowing GNU/Linux to become a real alternative to Unix.)
Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985. This prescient cause foresaw the personal data hazards that might arise from platforms like Facebook, whose sloppy data vendor relationships resulted in the violation of privacy of at least 87 million people in 2016. A bug allowed attackers to gain control over 50 million Facebook accounts in 2018.
The GNU Manifesto explicitly calls out the corporate work arrangement as a waste of time. It reads in part (emphasis added):
“We have already greatly reduced the amount of work that the whole society must do for its actual productivity, but only a little of this has translated itself into leisure for workers because much nonproductive activity is required to accompany productive activity. The main causes of this are bureaucracy and isometric struggles against competition. The GNU Manifesto contends that free software has the potential to reduce these productivity drains in software production. It announces that movement towards free software is a technical imperative, ‘in order for technical gains in productivity to translate into less work for us.’”
We have defined free software to mean “free of monetization techniques which contravene user privacy.” In most cases, free software is free of all the trappings of commercialization, including: restrictive copyrights, expensive licenses, and restrictions on alterations and redistribution. Bitcoin and Linux are examples of free software in both senses: both that it is free of surveillance, and also free to distribute and copy.
A system of values has evolved amongst free software developers, who distinguish themselves from proprietary software companies, which do not share their internal innovations publicly for others to build on; and who track users and sell their personal data.
Stallman’s primary critique of commercial software was the preoccupation with unproductive competition and monetization:
“The paradigm of competition is a race: by rewarding the winner, we encourage everyone to run faster…. if the runners forget why the reward is offered and become intent on winning, no matter how, they may find other strategies—such as, attacking other runners. If the runners get into a fist fight, they will all finish late. Proprietary and secret software is the moral equivalent of runners in a fist fight….. There is nothing wrong with wanting pay for work, or seeking to maximize one's income, as long as one does not use means that are destructive. But the means customary in the field of software today are based on destruction. Extracting money from users of a program by restricting their use of it is destructive because the restrictions reduce the amount and the ways that the program can be used. This reduces the amount of wealth that humanity derives from the program. When there is a deliberate choice to restrict, the harmful consequences are deliberate destruction.”
The “non-productive work” cited by Stallman harkens back to Veblen’s conception of “spurious technologies” developed in the service of some internal ceremonial purpose, to reinforce the existing company hierarchy:
“Spurious 'technological' developments... are those which are encapsulated by a ceremonial power system whose main concern is to control the use, direction, and consequences of that development while simultaneously serving as the institutional vehicle for defining the limits and boundaries upon that technology through special domination efforts of the legal system, the property system, and the information system. These limits and boundaries are generally set to best serve the institutions seeking such control.... This is the way the ruling and dominant institutions of society maintain and try to extend their hegemony over the lives of people.”
Hacker principles are codified in “Cathedral versus Bazaar”
In 1997, as the Web was gaining momentum, hacker Eric Raymond presented a metaphor for the way hackers developed software together. He compared the hacker approach, which relied on voluntary contributions, to a marketplace of participants who could interact as they wished: a bazaar.
Commercial software, he said, was like the building of a cathedral, with its emphasis on central planning and grand, abstract visions. The cathedral, he said, was over-wrought, slow, and impersonally designed. Hacker software, he claimed, was adaptable and served a larger audience, like an open bazaar.
With this metaphor in mind, Raymond codified 19 influential "lessons" on good practice in free open source software development. Some of the lessons appear below:
Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away. (Attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.
These ideas would come to crystallize the hacker approach to building software.
Hacker sub-cultures collide in Cyberspace
As the Web proliferated, hacker subcultures collided on message-boards and forums. All of them found they had a core set of common attitudes and behaviors including:
Sharing software and information
Freedom of inquiry
The right to fork the software
Distaste for authority
Playfulness and cleverness
But they had different ideas about how the Internet would develop in the future.
Utopian ideas about the power of computer networks to create post-capitalist societies had emerged as early as 1968. The utopians thought networked computers might allow society to live in a kind of Garden of Eden, mediated by autonomous computerized agents, free of labor, and co-existing with nature.
There were also dystopian visions. A young fiction writer William Gibson first coined the term “cyberspace” with his 1981 short story Burning Chrome.” In his conception, cyberspace was a place where massive corporations could operate with impunity. In his story, hackers could enter into cyberspace in a literal way, traversing systems that were so powerful that they could crush human minds. In cyberspace, Gibson imagined, government was powerless to protect anyone; there were no laws, and politicians were irrelevant. It was nothing but the raw and brutal power of the modern conglomerate. Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker and other writers went on to form the core of this radically dystopian literary movement.
The Utopians start getting rich
Another group of hackers hailed from the original 1960s counterculture. Many of them had a sanguine outlook on the Web as a new safe world where radical things could come true. Like with the acid counterculture, cyberspace could be a place where individuals were liberated from old corrupt power hierarchies.
This optimistic view pervaded the entrepreneurial circles of Silicon Valley in the 1980s and 1990s, creating an extremely positive view of technology as both a force for good and a path to riches. One British academic wrote at the time:
“This new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley… promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies. In the digital utopia, everybody will be both hip and rich.”
The ideas of the “aging hippies” culminated with the “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace” in 1996, written by a former Grateful Dead lyricist named John Perry Barlow, who had been part of the acid counterculture. By the mid-1990s, Silicon Valley startup culture and the upstart Wired magazine were coalescing around Barlow’s utopian vision of the World Wide Web. He began holding gatherings he called Cyberthons, as an attempt to bring the movement together. They unintentionally became a breeding ground for entrepreneurship, says Barlow:
“As it was conceived, [Cyberthon] was supposed to be the 90s equivalent of the Acid Test, and we had thought to involve some of the same personnel. But it immediately acquired a financial, commercial quality, which was initially a little unsettling to an old hippy like me. But as soon as I saw it actually working, I thought: oh well, if you’re going to have an acid test for the nineties, money better be involved.”
Emergence of Cypherpunk movement
But while the utopians believed everyone would become “hip and rich,” the dystopians believed that a consumer Internet would be a panopticon of corporate and governmental control and spying, the way William Gibson had imagined. They set out to save themselves from it.
They saw a potential solution emerging in cryptographic systems to escape surveillance and control. Tim May, Intel’s Assistant chief scientist by day, wrote the Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto in 1992:
“The technology for this revolution—and it surely will be both a social and economic revolution—has existed in theory for the past decade. The methods are based upon public-key encryption, zero-knowledge interactive proof systems, and various software protocols for interaction, authentication, and verification. The focus has until now been on academic conferences in Europe and the U.S., conferences monitored closely by the National Security Agency. But only recently have computer networks and personal computers attained sufficient speed to make the ideas practically realizable.”
Until recently, strong cryptography had been classified as weapons technology by regulators. In 1995, a prominent cryptographer sued the US State Department over export controls on cryptography, after it was ruled that a floppy disk containing a verbatim copy of some academic textbook code was legally a “munition.” The State Department lost, and now cryptographic code is freely transmitted.
Strong cryptography has an unusual property: it is easier to deploy than to destroy. This is a rare quality for any man-made structure, whether physical or digital. Until the 20th century, most “secure” man-made facilities were laborious to construct, and relatively easy to penetrate with the right explosives or machinery; castles fall to siege warfare, bunkers collapse under bombing, and secret codes are breakable with computers. Princeton computer scientist professor Arvind Narayan writes:
“For over 2,000 years, evidence seemed to support Edgar Allan Poe's Assertion, ‘human ingenuity can-not concoct a cypher which human ingenuity cannot resolve,’ implying a cat-and-mouse game with an advantage to the party with more skills and resources. This changed abruptly in the 1970s owing to three separate developments: the symmetric cipher DES (Data Encryption Standard), the asymmetric cipher RSA, and Diffie-Hellman key exchange.”
Of the 1990s, he says:
“For the first time, some encryption algorithms came with clear mathematical evidence (albeit not proofs) of their strength. These developments came on the eve of the microcomputing revolution, and computers were gradually coming to be seen as tools of empowerment and autonomy rather than instruments of the state. These were the seeds of the ‘crypto dream.’”
Cypherpunks were a subculture of the hacker movement with a focus on cryptography and privacy. They had their own manifesto, written in 1993, and their own mailing list which operated from 1992 to 2013 and at one point numbered 2,000 members. A truncated version of the manifesto is reproduced below. In the final lines, it declares a need for a digital currency system as a way to gain privacy from institutional oversight:
If a stake owner (sometimes called a validator) is chosen to validate a new group of transactions, they’ll be rewarded with cryptocurrency, potentially in the amount of aggregate transaction fees from the block of transactions. To discourage fraud, if you are chosen and verify invalid transactions, you forfeit a part of what you staked.